that defines the Anthropocene, the age where humans rule the Earth.
Chapter 3 will start by illustrating the co-dependence of natural and social systems through environmental history classic studies (such as the US “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s), to introduce readers to the ways economics can be useful in governing natural resources in a sustainable and fair way. It will then contrast Garrett Hardin’s social pessimism with the empirical evidence and theoretical breakthroughs of Elinor Ostrom in understanding how “commons” can be successfully and sustainably governed. In this perspective, the notion of environmental justice is essential to map and grasp. It has been defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” But there is no universal approach to it. Chapter 4 thus aims at equipping readers with analytical tools to understand the plurality of its approaches. Finally, to conclude Part I, Chapter 5 will assemble a “critical environmental economics toolbox,” putting inequality and justice back at the center of analysis and policy.
Part II opens with biodiversity and ecosystems challenges, which are daunting. For each of the Earth systems studied in this chapter, a brief review of its importance and role in the biosphere and current and future state will be presented. The chapter will also focus for each system on political dynamics and social issues, such as inequality in access to food and energy or the role of poverty in biodiversity destruction. In Chapter 7, two models of economic system are being contrasted: The current economy in which massive resource extraction leads to pollution and waste and a twenty-first century economy that genuinely minimizes the use of natural resources and toxic materials as well as the emissions of waste and pollutants over the life cycle of the service or product. This chapter will explore how to shift economic systems from one to the other, discussing the meaning and possibility of “decoupling.”
In Chapter 8, the much-documented nexus between fossil fuel consumption and climate change will be detailed as well as the policy needed to accelerate the on-going but painfully slow low carbon transition. This low carbon transition must be a “just transition” that gives its full place to climate justice. On this path, it is decisive to demonstrate that environmental sustainability is not incompatible with well-being; quite the contrary. Energy transition can lead to massive job creation and mitigation of ecological crises can provide crucial health co-benefits, while new indicators of well-being, resilience and sustainability can reform policy for the better. This is what Chapter 9 intends to show.
Social-ecology analysis and policy are the topics of Chapter 10. The gap between the rich and the poor and the interaction of the two groups leads to the worsening of environmental degradations and ecological crises that affect everyone, but not the same way. The current global effort to avoid the worst of these consequences and shift social and natural systems toward a more sustainable path does not take place in a vacuum but in a specific institutional context where capitalism, globalization, and digitalization all impact the social-ecological transition. Chapter 11 will thus explore their complementarities but also many contradictions. Finally, Chapter 12 focuses on urban sustainability and polycentric transition. Under the combined influence of globalization and urbanization, cities (and metropolitan areas) have become key players alongside nation-states in our world. They matter greatly in the opportunities given to people (geography influences history) but also have a critical impact on sustainability (cities account for 75% of global CO2 emissions). As Elinor Ostrom rightly pointed out, “polycentric transition” toward sustainability is happening, with each level of government seizing the opportunity of the well-being and sustainability transition to reinvent prosperity and policy without waiting for the impetus to come from above. But cities and localities, like nation-states, regional organizations, and international institutions, have to articulate the challenge of sustainability with the imperative of justice.
Notes
1 Milton Friedman made this analogy clear: “Positive economics is, or can be, an ‘objective’ science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences,” Friedman (1953). 2 The “People’s Agreement of Cochabamba” or “Cochabamba Declaration,” agreed upon at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth on April 22, 2010 in Bolivia states: “It is imperative that we forge a new system that restores harmony with nature and among human beings” (see Chapter 4). 3 H.Res.109 – Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal. 116th Congress (2019–2020). 4 Sustainable Equality – Report of the Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality, 2018. 5 Speech at the COP 24, December 15, 2018. 6 Agyeman, Bullard and Evans (2002) have first mentioned the idea of a nexus between “sustainability, environmental justice and equity.” 7 See for instance Laurent (2011 and 2018); Dasgupta and Ramanathan (2014); Motesharrei et al. (2014); and Gough (2017). 8 Boyce (1994). 9 To illustrate this point, consider the fact that while human population has increased by 87% between 1970 and 2010, the exposure of people to tropical cyclones increased by 192% in the same period (more than twice), most of them living in the poorest countries of the planet (source: UN). Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines on November 8, 2013 caused the death of 6,000 people and the forced displacement of three and a half million others.10 It has been estimated by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2017 that emissions from 90 fossil-fuel and cement industries, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Peabody Energy, ConocoPhillips, and Total, contributed nearly half of the increase in global average temperature, and 30% of the rise of the oceans between 1880 and 2010. See Ekwurzel, Boneham, Dalton et al. (2017).11 Report of the Brundtland Commission, “Our Common Future,” 1987.
1 What the classics know about our world; what twentieth-century economics forgot
History of thoughts, too often forgotten in existing conventional economics textbooks, is not just about remembering past insights and forgotten intuitions. It is mostly about confronting older thinking to current challenges to understand how problems, and more importantly solutions, can look alike or differ from one era to the next. In this respect, contrary to a common belief, the twin concern for sustainability and justice has been around for quite some time in economic analysis.
The physiocrats: Natural resources as political power
The physiocrats, a group of philosophers and policy-makers in eighteenth-century France,1 can claim two important firsts regarding economics: They were the first to build a consistent model of the economy where natural resources played the central role; they were also the first to pretend, falsely, that economics was a science, the physics of the social world, based on universal and robust laws. François Quesnay and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot were towering figures of the movement, with Pierre de Samuel Du Pont de Nemours and Marquis de Mirabeau as important secondary characters.
François Quesnay (1694–1774), the founder of physiocracy from an intellectual standpoint, was a physician by training and saw the economy as a human body, where blood circulation amounted to trade and social classes mirrored vital organs. Quesnay’s
